BBC’s Radio 2 Breakfast Show loses one million listeners after Zoe Ball replaces Chris Evans

BBC’s Radio 2 Breakfast Show has lost nearly a million listeners in the first year since Zoe Ball replaced Chris Evans.

She pulled in 8.2million weekly listeners in 2019’s final quarter, compared to 9.1million before Evans left in 2018.

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Her show is up on the previous quarter’s 7.9million.

Evans, now hosting the Virgin Radio breakfast show, saw a rise to 1.2million weekly listeners — up from one million when he started in January 2019.

Greg James’ Radio 1 breakfast show is down to 4.8million from 5.1million over the same 12 months.

James Purnell, director of BBC radio and education, said: "Our brilliant stations are much loved by our audiences and in this quarter we've seen some strong numbers for our speech stations, including a record for Radio 4 Extra.

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"The latest figures show some of the challenges we face across the radio industry with retaining a live listening habit amongst young people, whose audio consumption is rapidly changing.

"We are focused on keeping live listening strong and looking for new ways to do so, but we also want to ensure we offer more for our audiences however they want to listen.

"During this quarter alone, we saw more than 100 million on demand plays of our content on BBC Sounds, double the previous quarter, demonstrating the increasing popularity of our radio programmes outside of our linear schedules."

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